


half here, half vicarious

by kdee



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Pining, Post Season 1, Psychic Abilities, Soulmates, psychic!mike
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-22
Updated: 2017-10-22
Packaged: 2019-01-21 15:20:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12460500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kdee/pseuds/kdee
Summary: “If you’re out there, just, please, give me a sign.”He sees her shadow in the school gymnasium. Her body floating in the community pool.





	half here, half vicarious

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [a year with(out) you](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12353688) by [kdee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kdee/pseuds/kdee). 



> this is a take 2 of the original fic above: this time with a psychic soulmate twist and a much less stable mike. 
> 
> as said in the original fic, this is inspired by the theory that hopper is hiding el out in chicago (the 'big city' that he used to work in); the psychic/soulmate idea was taken from a very short shot in the superbowl trailer, where i fancied that mike crying glitched to el crying in the exact same location. my tumblr is @gohawkins if you'd like to freak out how s2 is in 4 DAYS!!! enjoy. :-)

_5 days._

Mike twists the top of the trash bag into a knot. Heaving it over the kitchen floor, he toes the door open, trudges down to the trashcans, and lifts the lid. The monotony of this day, empty of _her_ , is already weighing down on him.

That’s when he sees it.

A torn part of cardboard packaging for Eggos stuck to the inside of the metal lid. Mike freezes, his breath rushing out of his lungs.

 And time seems to do the same around him.

_Mom doesn’t buy them anymore. She ate them every morning and I can’t anymore. She preferred them over any other food, was so reluctant to eat anything else but these stupid waffles._

_Mom doesn’t buy them anymore._

Mike’s chest drops simultaneously with the trash can lid, not even registering the loud metal _clang_ on the ground. He stares and stares and stares into the dark expanse of the trashcan, pulse thudding in his head, realising this packaging is from when Eleven was _here_. It’s only when the wind nips at his cheeks does he realize he’s crying.

“Michael?” His mother calls from the house.

Mike still dimly registers the trash he still has to put away despite the blood swirling thickly around his head. He can’t think. He hoists the trash bag up and all but hurls it in, almost losing his footing while doing so.

Then, breathing hard, he steps forward and picks up the can’s lid, slams it on top. He needs to get her out his head before he loses it. Lifting the lid a fraction above the trashcan, he does it again, and maybe he doesn’t really want her out of his head. And again. And again, and again, and again, his vision blurring and the frosted metal biting into his hand and the image of a girl asking him to make a promise on a laboratory table in a quiet voice and she’s gone, gone, _gone_ —

Soft hands pull him away and back into the house.

 

_1 week._

He’s on the brink of sleep when he hears it under his pillow. A crackle.

Like the flare of a match, Mike is instantly awake and clutching the walkie-talkie, breathing “ _El?_ ”

He can’t hear anything other than his own gasping for nearly a few minutes, but he keeps his eyes squeezed shut and hopes. He needs it to be her. Even when ten minutes has passed, he whispers her name, like he’s trying to coax her to speak. “I know you’re there _. Please,_ El.”

 _Please, please, please_ , he repeats, a mantra. His eyes are burning.

He repeats please until it doesn’t sound like a word, until it sounds like a prayer.

 

_2 weeks._

“If you’re out there, just, please, give me a sign.”

He waits.

He makes signs out of whispering trees, creaking floorboards and a broken walkie-talkie. He sees her shadow in the school gymnasium. Her body floating in the community pool. He waits quietly while the world continues to spin, moving on without her – Mike hates that, hates that he has lost the most bright, burning star that he’d just begun to orbit.

 

_3 weeks._

He knows, after Will, that he shouldn’t be going into the woods – there’s been nothing but trouble every time he’s gone looking. But there’s something pulling him there.

When he ventures into the woods to look for her, he gets lost whilst calling her name.

_“Mike.”_

_Mike froze, halfway out of Nancy’s doorway; then he broke into a run down the hallway. Clutched in his hand was the old wig El had used – stupidly, Mike thought that bringing it with him to the woods would draw her to him. A beacon._ Stupid, _he thought._

“Mike!"

_He nearly got to the stairs before Nancy grabbed his wrist. He shrugged her off, refusing to meet her eyes, knowing the look that would be there – pity, resignation, exasperation. His fist tightened around the wig._

_“What do you think you’ll find?” Nancy asked._

_Mike looked up, surprised by the question. And Nancy’s eyes just looked… sad. Sad for her kid brother. But, of course, the suggestion was there. That going into the woods was useless, that he would find nothing but his own desperation. No one believed that El could’ve gotten out. Not even his own sister, who’d escaped the Upside Down._

_“Her.” Mike’s voice was hardened._

_“Mike—“_

_“I need to do this.” He turned away, heading down the stairs. “Don’t tell Mom and Dad.”_

_Nancy reached for him, but he lurched away, breaking anew into a run. He opened the front door to the cold night air, Nancy’s voice calling again cut short as he closed it._

Every sound is amplified, and with his flashlight blinking in and out of existence he thinks he might _scream_. The mangled blonde wig sits in his backpack, along with old Eggo packaging and some clean clothing from the hamper. He’s lost in the woods where he first saw her.

Mike yells her name once more, throat now on fire.

And then he finally gives up, sitting down against a tree and the ground is—unnervingly hard. Icy cold almost immediately seeps into him. Mike wonders if maybe this is how cold she was when they met in that rain, with that thin t-shirt. How she felt when she had to spend the night here after knocking Lucas out. When they’d abandoned her. Mike feels abandoned.

He wonders whether El feels like she’s abandoned him. If she’s here.

If she’s alive.

Mike’s face crumbles in the dark and he doesn’t bother to cover his face as his eyes spill over, his fingers instead clawing down into the dirt that El could’ve treaded. Or slept on. Or, in the other world, is harbouring her dead weight. He sucks in jagged breaths, muffling his sobs into his knees, fingers caked in mud and the ghost of a girl. Sobs himself into exhaustion.

He whimpers her name, asks her _why, why did you leave, why did you go to a place where I can’t look for you?_

He doesn’t hear the footfall answer him, too distant to hear. A few feet away from him sits a box. The old snow on top is disturbed, the Eggos inside of it recently taken out.

As Mike slowly picks himself up on wobbly legs, his flashlight skitters over its surface. The light flickers, on and off – as he looks up, the light fails. The box is left in darkness. And then, as he redirects the flashlight with numb fingers to the trees where it clicks on again, in a night that seems to never end, he almost crawls his way through the trees and finds himself at the edge of the woods.

He collapses there, and finds himself swimming in a state of sleep that he never fully sinks into, the cold stinging against his wet eyes.

After a few minutes, or hours, or years, there are footsteps, dimly, then red and blue lights washing over him. He is being roughly shaken and drowned in urgent questions in a voice he recognises as Hopper and his parents, _could’ve died… frozen to death… could’ve gone missing…_

Could’ve found her.

 

_7 months._

A drop of blood blooms onto the paper below him. Cursing, Mike pushes away his Chemistry paper and wipes his nose with the back of his hand, a long red streak neatly bisecting his hand from his knuckles to wrist. When he realises the bleeding won’t stop, he sighs and abandons the homework to go to the bathroom.

This keeps happening.

Mike pushes open the bathroom door and his hand tightens on the handle when he catches a glimpse of himself in the cabinet mirror. Bloody nose, tired eyes, exactly like she did after using her powers, after fighting…

He turns to shut the door and has to lean his forehead on it for a couple of moments: the only thing he’s been fighting is school. And maybe Dustin’s and Lucas’ attempts at wooing Max. Determinedly not looking at the mirror, Mike runs the tap and bends down to wash his face, the icy water waking him up and stopping any thoughts of her from entering the fringes of his consciousness.

His eyes flicker to a streak of dirt on the edge of the sink as his hands leave his cheeks. Mike pauses, turns off the tap. He can see another smudge along the wall next to the sink, and knows that it must continue around to the door. Someone who’s spent time in the dirt has used the sink to clean themselves up; they’ve done it in a hurry. Dirt from the woods. Holly’s world is dominated by tea parties, not treasure hunts. The temperature in the bathroom drops imperceptibly. A shift in the air.

Mike knows that he’s giving up if he turns around. But he does, heart in his throat.

Then two eyes are swimming with tears, the pretence of _moving on_ stripped away, because there’s nothing. He’s staring at an empty space shapelessly filled with her absence. Mike squeezes his eyes shut in an attempt to stop her last words from pricking at him, his own name a thorn in his chest.

His nose continues to bleed. He tastes blood.

As he walks back into his room, he absently picks at his nails, as if trying to dig out dirt from underneath them.

This keeps happening.

 

_9 months._

The blanket has moved, he _knows_ it has.

Mike sits in the fort, sometimes, when it becomes _really_ bad, and folds all the blankets inside. Just so everything is neat when she comes back. If she comes back.

He’s found a softer blanket in the laundry cabinet which she’d probably like. Baby pink. He avoids looking at the entire fort too often, but can’t bear to take it down because it’s the only thing he has left of her – the only thing that still has her presence intact. So if his chest is cleaved in two for the now occasional D&D campaign the group has, he can deal with it. The rest of the boys haven’t commented on Mike moving seats so he doesn’t have to face it.

Yet tonight is bad.

And when he comes down to the basement, he can see that the previously folded, baby pink blanket is now strewn across the fort, the rest of the blankets creased and pulled, and he thinks he might throw up.

No one else comes down here other than him and the rest of the boys. No one sits in the fort other than Mike.

A surge of adrenaline overtakes him, and Mike nearly launches himself down the stairs on his way to grab the walkie-talkie. He grapples with the antenna for a moment before he clicks through to Lucas.

“Lucas, are you there? I think, I think she—“

“Mike?”

“I think she’s been here, El, the blanket’s been, just, it’s been moved,” Mike’s speech is garbled as his eyes spark around the room, waiting for something to happen, to float, a door to slam, “and no one else sits in here, Lucas—“

“Mike—“

“—looks like it’s been _slept_ on or something, it’s not warm or anything but I can just _tell_ , it’s, it’s—“

“ _Mike_.”

“Wh… What?” He’s breathless.

Lucas’ speech is gentle, but has an underlying flint hard edge.

“It’s a blanket, Mike.” Mike opens his mouth to respond, but as if he senses it, Lucas carries on. “I know you’re… waiting.”

Mike swallows.

You’re waiting for her to turn up, or for a sign that she’s still here—“

“Lucas—“

“ _Mike_. We _all_ miss her. We _all_ want her back, even Will. But you can’t… do this to yourself, man. You’re killing yourself.”

Mike doesn’t respond, his voice dried in his throat. His high has crashed, the room suddenly stiflingly small.

“Over and out.”

Instead of sleeping in his own bed, Mike wraps himself in his sleeping bag and lets the sheets fall over the entrance so he’s ensconced in darkness. He’s shaking.

Chicago’s getting pretty cold.

 

_11 and a half months._

It’s getting darker in the evenings now. The wind is turning leaves from yellow to gold, thin and smelling of bonfire smoke.

_“Sometimes I feel like I still see her.”_

Or maybe he’s still in mourning like Nancy is, whenever that thick, black silence comes over her and she locks her door and doesn’t eat for an entire day. His mother’s frantic, helpless energy in those periods makes being in the house insufferable, like he’s suffocating between both of their guilty consciences. Barb is still dead.

Hopper’s face had given nothing away. He’d stopped by Mike with a gruff _how’re you holding up_ after visiting the Byers. _Holding up._ Mike still sometimes feels like the world is crashing around his ears and he’s holding the shards of the sky in his hands after her last scream. Perhaps Hopper’s eyes spark with guilt, or flicker uncomfortably, but Mike is immediately reminded of his friends. Forget it, Mike had told him. _You know you’re going crazy._

Because he keeps tasting blood at the back of his throat. He keeps hearing whispers in the rustle and crush of the just turning leaves. Keeps getting drawn back into her fort. He sees the glare of city lights behind his eyes when he goes to sleep and feels lost when he wakes up.

Hopper gives nothing away.

He thinks he’s going crazy.

 

_12 months._

Mike knows El wouldn’t want this. Wouldn’t want him to waste away like, become a shell of who he used to be. A dead autumn leaf waiting to be crushed.

He hates that he thinks about her like a ghost. Haunting him.

Or a weapon, used against her will, or a girl who didn’t know what a friend was, who left without knowing how much she was loved. What it meant to be loved.

Mike hates that his memories are becoming foggy, like there is one shoe inside _then_ and one inside _now_. He’s talking like her. Monosyllabic. Words being sifted through a rusty filter.

She’s becoming a half-buried eulogy.

When Will starts to leave the room too quickly, is going to the doctor more frequently, Mike starts to think that they are all getting dragged into another nightmare. One that she can’t save them from, not this time.

Not without being found first.


End file.
